English Relative Clauses - Non-finite Relative Clauses

Non-finite Relative Clauses

Certain non-finite clauses (also called infinitive or participial clauses or phrases) can be classified as relative clauses. These include:

  • infinitive clauses with an explicit relative pronoun (generally used with a fronted preposition): She is the woman on whom to rely.
  • infinitive clauses having a zero object argument and qualifying an element that serves as the antecedent of that argument: He is the man to beat Ø; She is the woman to rely on Ø.
  • past participle clauses having a zero object argument and qualifying an element that serves as the antecedent of that argument: The body found Ø here yesterday has now been identified. These have been called "reduced object relative passive clauses", and have been an object of psycholinguistic research in the area of sentence processing; see Reduced relative clause: Non-finite types.
  • present participle clauses having a zero subject argument and qualifying an element that serves as the antecedent of that argument: The man Ø sitting on the bank was fishing. These are least likely to be classified as relative clauses.

Read more about this topic:  English Relative Clauses

Famous quotes containing the word relative:

    And since the average lifetime—the relative longevity—is far greater for memories of poetic sensations than for those of heartbreaks, since the very long time that the grief I felt then because of Gilbert, it has been outlived by the pleasure I feel, whenever I wish to read, as in a sort of sundial, the minutes between twelve fifteen and one o’clock, in the month of May, upon remembering myself chatting ... with Madame Swann under the reflection of a cradle of wisteria.
    Marcel Proust (1871–1922)